Wednesday, 19 August 2015

TweetOne of the
themes coming from those who issue increasingly dire warnings about the danger
for the Labour Party if Corbyn should win the leadership contest is that
democracy depends on there being an alternative party which can be elected to
form a government.Miliband Senior referred
explicitly to the possibility of the UK becoming a “one-governing-party state”,
which is at least a more accurate description of the feared outcome than the
more simplistic “one-party state” used by others.

The Labour
Party’s fears are not restricted to the UK level of government.With the SNP on anything up to 62% of the
vote, according to the latest opinion polls, even the much more representative
system used for Holyrood elections looks likely to be dominated by one party with
no alternative looking electable at present.

As far as I’m
aware, though, the Labour Party’s deep and sincere concern for having a viable
alternative party of government doesn’t extend to Wales for some strange
reason, despite Wales being the one place in the UK where there has been no
change of lead party in government for the last 16 years, and where there is no
such change in prospect either.It’s
easier to accept the concept of there being only one party with a realistic
chance of forming a government if it happens to be your party, I suppose.

Is it actually
true that a functioning democracy depends on there being an immediately viable
alternative government-in-waiting?It’s
asserted as unassailable truth often enough, of course.In Wales, even the Tories claim it as a necessity,
acting as a justification for their repeated proposal for an alliance of
everybody else against Labour – a proposal which makes considerably more sense
in terms of simple arithmetic than it does in terms of politics.

In Scotland,
there have even been anguished howls from some commentators that the system is
fundamentally flawed if it allows any party to dominate in the way that the SNP
seem likely to if the polls are anywhere near correct.Whilst the first-past-the-post system used at
UK level could indeed be said to be flawed, producing as it has a majority
government on the basis of a 37% share of the vote, I’m not sure that the more
proportional system used in Scotland and Wales is as badly flawed.And even though I’d prefer a system based on
a single class of members using STV, there is no system of voting which can
guarantee a viable government-in-waiting if the most popular party starts to
attract 50-60% of the votes.

If the electors
are happy with continued government by a single party (whichever party) and
continue to elect it with a majority in successive elections, any claim that a
functioning democracy depends on there being a viable alternative sounds a lot
like saying that the electorate have got it wrong, and have no right to exclude
other parties from government.It’s up
to those other parties to enthuse the electors enough to make them want to vote
differently.

The problem
that dogs politics in the UK is that for too long, the ‘alternative’ parties
have believed that the only way to do that is to sound increasingly like the
party that they want to dislodge, and to fight elections on the basis of being
different people rather than people with different views.But having two parties saying the same thing
and taking turns at governing is really little different from a ‘one-governing-party
state’ in practice, because they become more like two factions within a single
party than two different parties.

In that sense,
the idea that there needs to be an alternative to keep democracy functioning is
a very superficial one.Unless that
alternative government is actually offering something very different, it’s more
a way of preventing democratic change than facilitating it, by trying to convince
the electorate that they have a choice when they don’t.